Ralph Lewis, MD, is a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Canada; an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto; and a psycho-oncology consultant at the Odette Cancer Centre in Toronto. Dr. Lewis writes a popular blog series, Finding Purpose, hosted and promoted by his hospital. As of June 2018 he has also been blogging for Psychology Today. He has published articles on a psychiatric understanding of belief and purpose in Skeptic magazine and The Human Prospect, and delivered presentations on these topics at the James Randi Educational Foundation’s TAM conference, Institute for Science and Human Values, and Canadian Association for Spiritual Care. Dr. Lewis helps people seeking meaning in the face of severe and tragic adversity, in addition to extensive experience with complex and subtle psychiatric and psychological conditions. He is interested in the unreliability of intuition and subjective perception in shaping our explanations and beliefs, and the neural basis of motivation and purposiveness. Dr. Lewis obtained his MD (MBBCh) in 1990 at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, where he grew up. He completed residency training in Psychiatry at the University of Toronto in 1996 and went on to do a two year clinical research fellowship jointly at Sunnybrook and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (previously the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry), with a concurrent Master of Science in Neuroscience at the University of Toronto. He has held his present staff physician appointment at Sunnybrook and his faculty appointment at the University of Toronto since 1998.
Ralph, his wife Karin and their three children try to live purposeful, inspired lives in a godless world—appreciating the random, precarious, and precious nature of life and knowing that while the universe doesn’t care, people can and do care.